Transitioning Children from Early Childhood Education to School: Teacher Beliefs and Transition Practices

Abstract

Children's experience of the transition between early childhood education and school can have a long-term impact on their school achievement and retention. Although both practitioners and researchers often describe ideal transition arrangements in terms of collaboration between families and teachers in the two sectors, little is known about what this means in terms of practice. In this survey of early childhood educators and school teachers' beliefs and practices about the transition we found that, despite a commitment to collaborate, teachers from the two sectors had very different expectations of each other and most were dissatisfied with the current arrangements. They had insufficient knowledge of individual children's achievement to help the children utilize what they had learned in early childhood settings in their new school environment. Implications of this study for assisting teachers to develop more educationally defensible transition arrangements are discussed.